Book Review: Guardian of the Gate

Book Review: Guardian of the Gate, sequel to Prophecy of the Sisters, by Michelle Zink

Book description from amazon.com:
In this highly-anticipated sequel to Prophecy of the Sisters, sixteen year-old orphan Lia Milthorpe continues her quest to end an ancient prophecy that has turned generations of sisters against each other. Having now accepted the responsibilities tied to her role as Gate, Lia journeys to the unchartered isle of Altus to continue her search for the missing pages of the Book of Chaos--the pages that could tell her how to end the prophecy once and for all. Along the way, her courage, strength, and soul are tested in ways she never could have imagined.

Meanwhile, twin sister Alice continues to hone her spellcasting abilities, completely ignoring the rules that govern the Otherworlds. Alice will stop at nothing to reclaim Lia's role of Gate, and that's not the only thing she wants. There's also Lia's true love, James.

The outcome of this battle between sisters will have consequences of Biblical proportion. In the end, only one sister will be left standing.

The Review:

Just before I came across with Prophecy of the Sisters, I had just read L J. Smith's The Vampire Diaries: The Return: Midnight and IT'S SO AWFUL THAT I CAN'T BRING MYSELF TO FINISH IT. Prophecy of the Sisters was a welcomed change from the awful continuity that is The Vampire Diaries (seriously Miss Smith, you should have ended the series with book 4 ). However, Prophecy of the Sisters as a stand-alone read,still isn't that much of a satisfying works. But I'm willing to give its sequel The Guardian of the Gate a try, to see how things will work out in said sequel.

Starts from the very beginning, it's quite obviously that the publisher of the Prophecy of the Sisters series: Little, Brown & Co. wants to paint Miss Zink as the next 'ordinary-housewife-turned-best-seller-wonder' after Stephenie Meyer, another author from the same publisher, who gained such a massive financial success with her Twilight series. To be fair, Miss Zink is a better author than Stephenie Meyer---although it still doesn't say much, a lot, I mean a lot of authors are better authors than Stephenie Meyer, though I still feel sorry for Miss Zink having to be compared with Meyer, the comparsion isn't even necessary.

Although I know that tons of first timer authors came up with wonderful debut novels, but instead of going shoulder to shoulder with those other first timers who wrote satisfying debut works; Prophecy of the Sisters and Guardian of the Gate only show us Miss Zink's shortcoming, instead of demonstrating her strength as an author.

Guardian of the Gate opens with Lia and her friends: Sonia, Luisa, and Edmund, trusted companion of Lia's late father, trying to uncover the remaining lost Keys and the lost pages of the Book of Chaos, in order to stop her evil twin Alice from destroying the world. There's nothing wrong with the setup above, but what I found really frustrating is the fact that the entire book is wasted on just finding the lost pages, and they didn't even come close to find the two lost Keys. In fact the plot of finding the two lost Keys is simply dropped aside in Guardian of the Gate when Miss Zink had made such a big deal about finding the lost Keys in the previous book.

Oh god, so we need an entire book for the characters to wander around searching for some missing pages of a book, without doing anything else,  what a terrible direction for plot development.

In the middle of  Lia's quest, the trio encountered a guy called Dimitri, who Lia only saw once before in some meeting. The second Dimitri reappeared, I started suspecting he's a spy; but very disappointingly, Lia and Co. accepted Dimitri almost at once, without any doubt or suspicion. Not one of them had any second thought about the guy's motive! How anticlimactic! I'm not sure what Miss Zink tried to proof by adding Dimitri, but I really see no reason for Lia and Co. to trust him so quickly, especially when they all knew their enemy's agents are everywhere to get them?.

As to the heroine Lia, she is okay, but I still don't know much about her even after two books went by. I still don't know if she has any hobby or interest outside of getting marry. Even though she is the 'good' twin and she cares about the people around her, still she appears to be quite weak-willed when facing her evil twin sister. As the heroine, Lia needs to show her strength, but to the end of the book she's hardly getting any stronger, nor wiser. In fact in book 2 she's the one who needed to be rescued and cared for, various times. She's given hardly a chance to proof herself; but other people keep on telling her she's stronger than she gives herself credit of? Oh please Miss Zink, where did the 'show, not tell' principle go?

On the other hand, Alice is........barely there in book 2, when she showed up she only went spying on her sister and leaving behind some smartass threats. As a villain Alice went through no character development, she's getting boring and shallow, poor thing.

Back to Dimitri, the next thing we knew he became Lia's trusted person and the two were falling in love. Wait, so now Lia didn't love her boyfriend James anymore? Honestly, the Dimitri/Lia development might not be that big of a surprise. As you might notice, despite how often Lia claimed to love James and want nothing but to marry him; she always shoved James aside and never told him anything in book 1. Then she abandoned him entirely in book 2, without even bothered to leave the poor guy a warning: "Hey James, be careful with Alice! She's evil and she wants to hurt you, just to get back at me!!" instead Lia left the poor guy at Alice's mercy--when she knew fully well what Alice was capable of. Do we really need any more evidents to know that Lia didn't love/care about James much?

When Lia and Co. reached the magical island where the previous Prophecy Sisters kept themselves hidden from the outside world, and we learned that the Sisters were kind of like a secret order, or a small community of magicians and psychics. The idea is fine, but somehow we also learned that Lia will one day be the ruler/queen of said magical island.

Oh, so the shy, quiet girl is going to be queen and everyone notices how important, wonderful and special she really is. It's so not wish fulfillment.

Talks about wish fulfillment, Dimitri is being painted as the handsome, understanding, protective boyfriend, viewing Lia as a queen and treating her as such. Looks like he's pretty much a typical unrealistic dreamboat with no real flaw. Shallow character, I dare say.

The historical and mythical context is once again not there. I wanted to ask, if the Sisters shared such strong connection with the fallen angels and they might well make The End of the World come true, then why on earth the Vatican didn't try to interfere? It's quite difficult to believe the Church would be entirely unaware of the Sisters' existence through out history. I mean, hey! We're talking about The End of the World here! If someone is to have inside information about it, it'd be the Vatican definitely! So why it's never explained that why the existence of the Prophecy, the Sisters and their community are never noticed by those powerful religious organizations out there?

Plus, why no one ever seems to have considered killing the Gatekeeper at birth? Especially when she's so much a threat to humankind!? It's one of the logical, if immoral, actions people could preform in order to prevent The End of the World, you know!

Despite of the action scenes at the end of Guardian of the Gate, it seems there's no real threat in book 2. At least In book 1, Satan, or whatever his name is, actually bothered to chase after Lia in the otherworld, but this time around the guy only sent his foot soldiers to hunt Lia down. How frightening can it be?

In the end, we are also informed that some other Gatekeepers in the past had already leaked Satan's supporters into the Earth. So what's the point of Lia being the one and only Gatekeeper who could open the Gate and let Satan and Co. in, when other Gatekeepers had already leaked evil spirits into the world already? Which theory should we believe in now? Can anyone tell me!?

The ending is........another huge disappointment, there's no final show down; instead the characters ran from one scene to another like kids playing hide and seek. Again too many things left unexplained and unanswered, too big of a "Wait for the Next Book!" sign is being hanged on the last page, to a point I feel Guardian of the Gate is pretty much just yet another middle book that stretches the plot for no good reason.

The Final Words: If you can overlook the plot holes, the obvious exhaustion of creativity and flat characters, you might be okay with Guardian of the Gate.